Current Affairs

12/29/2013

Lanza was diagnosed in 2006 with "profound autism spectrum disorder, with rigidity, isolation and a lack of comprehension of ordinary social interaction and communications," while also displaying symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder, according to Dr. Robert A. King, a professor at the Yale School of Medicine Child Study Center.

But he also told investigators that he observed nothing in Lanza's behavior that would have predicted he would become a mass killer. Contacted by The Associated Press, King referred questions to the Yale University press office.

Peter Lanza, who was estranged from his son, told police that his son had Asperger's syndrome — a type of autism. Autism is not associated with criminal violence. Among the images released Friday was a photo of a birthday card he'd given Adam, offering to take his son hiking or shooting, though it's not clear when it was sent.

Kathleen A. Koenig, a nurse at the Yale Child Studies Center, told investigators that Lanza frequently washed his hands and changed his socks 20 times a day, to the point where his mother did three loads of laundry a day.

The nurse, who met with Lanza in 2006 and 2007, said Lanza's mother declined to give him prescribed antidepressant and antianxiety medication after she reported that he had trouble raising his arm, something she attributed to the drug.

This document and statement should put to rest the constant speculation and denial that Adam Lanza was diagnosed with autism. We were constantly told by journalists and bloggers and commenters that we had no proof of such diagnosis, or that it was never made.

We were told it wasn't autism, but Asperger's, which his less severe. Now we see that a recognized, authoritative doctor is explaining that it is "profound autism," and that it is co-morbid with obsessive-compulsive disorder. The father continues to describe it as Asperger's, but he is either in denial or ill-informed.

We can also note that this doctor doesn't have even the most basic background materials -- like Lanza's school essays that were disturbingly violent, that might have changed his opinion regarding potential violence.

Of course, there will be many who will continue to say "but there are other factors here, not autism," that led to this tragedy. Or they'll say "my autistic child is a sweet, peaceful kid, and it is so unfair to stigmatize him."

Neither of these attitudes will help avoid the next situation, which isn't going to come from the helicopter parents who interact constantly with their autistic child and are a huge factor in his peaceful outcome, but will come from parents in denial or who have ceased to cope with their autistic child, who then becomes violent.

Obviously, having this deeply upsetting news about your child puts some people in denial, as such parents themselves have described.

And there is an enormous amount of denial among parents and the liberal press that there is any connection between autism and violence whatsoever.

But there is, and this case shows it.

There may be factors that make this case rare or unique -- co-morbidity with untreated deprssion and OCD; dysfunctional parents; accessibility of guns; violent video games.

But certainly you couldn't say this case had "nothing" to do with autism. When a child has autism, the parents obviously also can become sick and dysfunctional. Here's a completely overwhelmed mother who has ceased listening to reason about a much-needed medication, and is also soothing herself with fairy-tales about "experiments" needed to see if her son can "handle" being home alone -- when he has not come out of his room for three months.

What should have happened is that this mother could call an ambulance and put her son in a psychiataric hospital, without a lot of resistance and obstruction. A person sitting alone in their room playing violent video cames is not someone you leave to their own devices, although we can understand how it happens that a mother in this situation begins to accept this profoundly dysfunctional situation as "the new normal." Society doesn't help her with this, because it either treats such behaviour as a source for comedy videos on Youtube, or says that it's even fine, and that it's wrong to put people in psychiatric hospitals againts their will.

The resistance to finding any link between autism and violence is as profound as the profound autism. And that's understandable, because parents don't want their children hurt, stigmatized, incarcerated against their will, harmed in any way. All understood.

But as with all things in life, there is a balance. All those things are desirable, but not having dozens of school children massacred is also desirable. And the key to preventing this again lies precisely in looking at the mother's situation -- it is one of no help, temporary measures, stigmatizing of her if she attempts psychiatric confinement or even the impossibility of getting good psychiatric confinement, despite her wealth, because of the profession's resistance.

The psychiatric profession resists this not merely because facilities are overcrowded or not very good at handling patients and improving them; they resist because they don't want to lose their licenses in a malpractice lawsuit for wrongful internment. If you don't believe me, ask them. Look at any court records where people tried to get psychiatric confinement for relatives beyond 3 days or 30 days, and see what the result was -- denial even for the 3 days, or refusal to follow up after the 30 days. Then they are back to square one.

We need to destigmatize psychiaric confinement, involve families and society more with it, make the facilities work, and stop exposing the general public to harm. That's all there is to it. Newtown proves this to us. And yet we are still hearing howling -- and will for a long time -- about making ANY association between autism and violence.

The chief reason we don'to see more cases of autism and violence isn't because of the lack of connection, but because hero-parents are bearing the brunt of the management of such patients on themselves, at enormous cost to themselves and the other members of their family. That's all good, if they have the will and resources to accept such a burden and can handle it.

But...some are, and one of the factors is the absence of a hero-parent. I'm not for waiting to see if hero-parents will break or not to deal with this problem -- a situation I've seen in both real life and in Second Life. I'm for being open and honest about the connection that does occur at times, and making it more than fine for such families to seek psychiatric confinement as a solution.

(Saved Tue Oct 29 20:48:08 2013)you have some interesting ideas/generalizations about autism.... some of which are rather hurtful.[18:57] Jullianna Juliesse: (Saved Tue Oct 29 20:49:59 2013)As someone who works with kids an young adults on the spectrum, just saying......[19:00] Prokofy Neva: That's great that you work with autistic kids. The public has the right to question some of the defensive myths built up around this subject by vested interests. Journalists and bloggers have a right to question it. When we have mass murders occur again and again with various factors converging, whether psychiatric drugs, video games, or autism spectrum, we have to investigate. It's not about hurting someone. You can go about your business. But you cannot deprive the rest of us from demanding answers and demanding protections. Adam Lanza's mother should have been able to get him into long-term residential treatment without facing so many barriers, end of story.[19:02] Jullianna Juliesse: I live in CT[19:02] Jullianna Juliesse: I know the people involved in that[19:02] Jullianna Juliesse: I find your generalizations hateful[19:03] Jullianna Juliesse: and I won't keep my opinions to myself.[19:03] Jullianna Juliesse: autism does not equal hate, or violence.[19:03] Jullianna Juliesse: ramble on missy.[19:04] Prokofy Neva: Great. Then you should endorse locking up people who are a danger to themselves and others. Well, it's too bad. They aren't hateful. They are a call to have less burden on families who turn themselves into burned-out heroes, and a call for society to do more. There's no reason why residential treatment has to be inhumane. But it does, though. Some of the people on the autism spectrum are indeed found to be violent. You'll have to accept this. And clearly one of the key reasons why we aren't seeing that is that parents hide this by absorbing all the difficulty themselves. I have seen it.[19:04] Prokofy Neva: Well ramble on yourself "missy".[19:04] Jullianna Juliesse: cut and paste. yay[19:04] Prokofy Neva: You don't sound terribly thoughtful or intelligent, but no doubt you do good work.[19:05] Jullianna Juliesse: You are not a parent, clearly[19:05] Prokofy Neva: So why don't you concentrate on doing your good work and stop trying to do thought-control and speech-control on other people[19:05] Prokofy Neva: Um, yes I am, in fact.[19:05] Jullianna Juliesse: thought control?[19:05] Prokofy Neva: And I don't accept bullshit -- I counter it.[19:05] Jullianna Juliesse: goodness[19:05] Prokofy Neva: And on this question, we're getting a lot of double talk.[19:05] Jullianna Juliesse: I work to counter it.[19:05] Prokofy Neva: No, you work to propagandize your PC thinking which is oppressive[19:06] Prokofy Neva: and that means people in trouble then feel they can't get help by having their loved ones go into mental institutions[19:06] Prokofy Neva: that's the problem[19:06] Prokofy Neva: you help stigmatize in fact[19:06] Jullianna Juliesse: oh?[19:06] Prokofy Neva: by making it seem that no one should ever be violent because they can't be violent -- a tautology.[19:06] Jullianna Juliesse: they are not.[19:06] Prokofy Neva: When there are cases of violence, and by autistic and by Aspbergers[19:06] Jullianna Juliesse: check the spelling.[19:07] Prokofy Neva: It doesn't mean all of them are, but for those percentage who are, in combination with other factors, more restraint is needed[19:07] Prokofy Neva: Check your snotty attitude[19:07] Jullianna Juliesse: we all see the world a different way[19:07] Prokofy Neva: I guess you're on the autistic spectrum yourself. Well, great, that should help your work with kids[19:07] Jullianna Juliesse: I will fight snottiness[19:07] Jullianna Juliesse: no, I am not.[19:07] Prokofy Neva: I'm not required to shackle my own perceptions over your neuralgia[19:07] Prokofy Neva: well whatever, you're a selfappointed heroine, clearly, and it's a bore[19:08] Jullianna Juliesse: oh you are special![19:08] Prokofy Neva: No, I'm not special, I'm a normal person who calls out the truth on this issue, that's all.[19:08] Jullianna Juliesse: You have no knowledge[19:08] Prokofy Neva: Parents like Nancy Lanza bear too much and it's because people like you stigmatize the idea of them admitting their child is violent[19:08] Jullianna Juliesse: and your ignorance of it is apparent.[19:08] Jullianna Juliesse: and when I see prejudice, I get Mad.[19:08] Jullianna Juliesse: MAD[19:08] Prokofy Neva: No, your unwillingness to see the truth about some percentage of cases is the real problem[19:09] Prokofy Neva: well get mad, you don't sound terribly bright[19:09] Jullianna Juliesse: there are people without autism who are messed up[19:09] Jullianna Juliesse: maybe I am not terribly bright[19:09] Prokofy Neva: But Adam Lanza was on the specturm, he became violent, and should have had earlier intervention[19:09] Prokofy Neva: your refusal to concede that is troublesome[19:09] Jullianna Juliesse: get over Adam Lanza.[19:09] Prokofy Neva: because it certainly doesn't harm the majority of non-violent autistic cases to admit that some are violent[19:10] Jullianna Juliesse: there are others who have donw far worse.[19:10] Prokofy Neva: No, I won't, because he massacred dozens of children[19:10] Jullianna Juliesse: yes, and my priest buried them[19:10] Prokofy Neva: Um, I think that's the largest number of children killed in America in one incident, or at least one of the largest[19:10] Jullianna Juliesse: do not blame autism[19:10] Prokofy Neva: so now I know that you ARE sectarian on this question and are trying to silence truthful discussion[19:10] Prokofy Neva: but he was on the spectrum, that was amply documented[19:11] Prokofy Neva: it's great that your priest helped the families. That doesn't make you an expert or the only legitimate voice on this subject[19:11] Jullianna Juliesse: you are singling out all people with autism[19:11] Jullianna Juliesse: fot the act of one[19:11] Jullianna Juliesse: *for[19:11] Jullianna Juliesse: which I find offensive[19:11] Prokofy Neva: No. I'm saying that this small minority of people who are violent need extra special treatment[19:11] Jullianna Juliesse: that is all.[19:12] Prokofy Neva: that doesn't mean all of them have to be arrested or forcibly treated. They aren't anyway. Getting treatment is a hugely difficult job.[19:12] Jullianna Juliesse: you are crazy.[19:12] Prokofy Neva: I'm for those cases where families can't cope with difficult and even violent children that they can get help and get residential treatment[19:12] Jullianna Juliesse: Autism is a neurological condition[19:12] Prokofy Neva: without the stigma that it "can't be" because "it can't be"[19:12] Prokofy Neva: So?[19:12] Prokofy Neva: so what?[19:12] Prokofy Neva: that doesn't change that it can be a factor for violence[19:12] Jullianna Juliesse: a sensory processing thing[19:13] Jullianna Juliesse: no speaking with you.[19:13] Jullianna Juliesse: Good night@[19:13] Prokofy Neva: It doesn't matter the etiology.[19:14] Jullianna Juliesse: %^&^%^%^%^%^%^[19:14] Prokofy Neva: What matters is that parents get help without judgement.[19:14] Prokofy Neva: You're one of the judgers.[19:14] Jullianna Juliesse: You do not know me[19:15] Jullianna Juliesse: Kindly do not pass judgment on those are different than you[19:15] Prokofy Neva: But that's what you're doing, trying to round me up and suppress my speech and override me[19:15] Jullianna Juliesse: Come spend a day with me and me kids[19:15] Prokofy Neva: I won't be changing my mind or my blogging[19:15] Jullianna Juliesse: fine[19:16] Prokofy Neva: I don't need to do that. I have my own kids to take care of and my own life. I have my opinion, that is valuable, and I will stick to it.[19:16] Prokofy Neva: I'm sure you do important work, don't try to be hegemonic about it[19:16] Jullianna Juliesse: well done[19:16] Prokofy Neva: It's not necessary for everyone in the world to believe your sectarian beliefs about your children in order to help them[19:16] Jullianna Juliesse: big word, yay[19:16] Prokofy Neva: No one is out to "get" your autistic children[19:16] Jullianna Juliesse: back the fuck off my friends, ok?[19:16] Prokofy Neva: But they sure as hell will not let any small percentage of violent autistic children with other factors like gun access kill the rest of our children. No thanks.[19:17] Prokofy Neva: Back the fuck off me.[19:17] Prokofy Neva: The end.[19:17] Prokofy Neva: You are not interesting to talk to[19:17] Jullianna Juliesse: people with autism are not violent[19:17] Prokofy Neva: Hilarious for YOU to tell me to back the fuck off, when you crossed the street to come in here and tell me your beliefs forcibly[19:17] Prokofy Neva: I didn't seek you out[19:17] Jullianna Juliesse: your are ill-informed, dearest.[19:17] Prokofy Neva: but some of them are[19:17] Prokofy Neva: that has been established[19:17] Prokofy Neva: and the questions have to be asked again and again[19:17] Prokofy Neva: precisely becuase of this stubborn omerta you have built up around the subject[19:18] Jullianna Juliesse: I write the grants, have the research.[19:18] Jullianna Juliesse: what do you do?[19:18] Jullianna Juliesse: oh wait, nothing![19:18] Jullianna Juliesse: mute![19:18] Prokofy Neva: So what? I have researched too, I've documented it on my blog, and I stand by it.[19:18] Prokofy Neva: I will continue to raise the issue.[19:18] Jullianna Juliesse: yay.

11/16/2013

I get sick of the Soros-funded, constantly showing up in my feed with their whining about the war on drugs, about supposedly "misguided" policies combating drug abuse and drug lords selling drugs, and even the "reconstruction" by the DEA of NSA intelligence about, say, Mexico or Afghanistan.

That's because drugs and their addicts and sellers wage war on me, my family, my community, my neighbourhood, and I think it's more than fine to fight back.

Many people who have never watched the justice system actually work in New York City have this illusion that there are "all these people" that are poor, black, Hispanic, minorities who are arrested for small amounts of marijuana and locked up.

That's not true, as the vast majority get a desk appearance ticket, and if they show up, the charges are often dismissed, in my experience watching how it works *directly*, not from theory.

If they are recidivists, if they have a little more amount of the drug, yes, they might find themselves forced into a plea-bargain, which is arguably overused in the system, or they might, if they are poor and black and forced to rely only on the Legal Aid Society, be shuffled into the poor people's court system, which indeed works very different than the rich people's court system, and be forced to go to jail or 30 days or do community service or worse. An expensive lawyer meanwhile may get his rich client off.

The rich can afford bail; it's impossible to even get bail if you are in debt or owe taxes or have some lien in your record -- it won't be given to you, even if you produce the 10 percent amount. Many attempts have been made to reform he bail system desperately in need of reform; it's currently unaccessible.

Stop and frisk is over used -- my son was among a group of youths hanging out in Brighton Beach, he dropped a kleenex on the ground while the police were trying to shake down these kids and find out if they had any drugs, and when the police accused him of throwing away drugs, he retrieved the dirty kleenex and explained he had allergies. This was considered sassing the police, and he got a desk appearance ticket. He had no drugs; none of them did. He complied with a request to retrieve and show what he had thrown away; he was not charged with any offense. Even so, he got the DAT. The DAT is WAY overused and I've seen this over and over again.

Yes, stop and frisk is overused on the poor and the black and Hispanic, and it should be reformed -- it is overbroad, in the apartment complexes, the homes, chasing people up stairwells into their apartments -- all of this is overkill. We all know this, but the judge in the case where it might have been reformed was too zealous and politicized and tried to throw the justice system toward her "progressive" beliefs and now the results are overturned. Pity.

So I don't have a problem understanding the justice systems flaws, and I'm four-square for civil rights.

here's the problem. There still needs to be a war on drugs *anyway*. Here's why.

The oxycontin epidemic sweeping over our state (roxies, blues) is hugely scary. It leads people to go to heroin and crack very quickly, they start powdering and smoking roxies then move to heroin.

It has been shockingly horrible for me to witness how neighbourhoods where I and my relatives live have been demolished by this drug epidemic that Soros thinks can be fixed merely by legalization or harm reduction and not combat with arrests, trials, sentences, diversion of youths into custody in juvenile homes, and compulsory treatment. I'm all for a separate drug court; then use it. Fight crime with it. It needs fighting.

Why? Because two children in my children's Facebook circles DIED from drugs. One minute my daughter is giving the homework assignment to a girl in front of her in a class; two hours later she is dead from a drug overdose. Another boy "wakes up dead" from taking a drug, his parents found him.

What's especially sad is how many Russians and Eurasians are caught up in this epidemic -- the children of dissidents, the children of Jewish refuseniks of the Soviet era, the children of Central Asians escaping tyranny of the Putin era, children of many scientists and mathematicians and teachers and computer programmerss who even got into good schools like Stuyvesant. Really, really sad to see this.

Kids maintaining drug dens in the rec room while their parents are at work -- and the police know it and do nothing. Why? They're waiting to catch the kingpins? So it's okay to watch dozens of our kids get addicted by these shadowy figures and do nothing in the mean time?! Kids arrested multiple times for bringing their friends to their parent's house even when they are home, getting them high, stealing all their computers and wallets. Kids arrested for stealing thousands of dollars of their parents' own jewelry to get drugs. Kids beaten by drug dealers to the point of disfigurement. Kids going to Rikers Island (prison) now instead of college.

I'm talking about dozens and dozens of kids -- it's a scourge. Kids who used to be on the playground, swinging, or on the basketball court, playing ball, or next to my kids in math class -- now on Rikers, now sent upstateto rehab, now in the hospital with broken bones from a drug dealer.

Please call me when you are a parent, and your kids have THIS happen to their friends. When you wake up every day thankful your kids aren't on drugs, and pray they will make it through another day in their drug-ridden schools without being harmed.

Harm reduction doesn't help -- I live in a neighbourhood chock full of hospitals where they all come for needles and methadone and the more popular suboxone which is really heroin, too, and all it does is add to more crime, more sales, more mayhem. I stood in line for a prescription for my son while he was in the hospital, and police are guarding the line, and trying to control the chaos caused by scamming drug addicts.

In between the time I handed my prescription in to the window, and the time I went to the line to wait two hours at another window for pick-up, *my son's prescription was simply stolen*. By the personnel. Before it even reached me. I had to go to doctors to get it again, who sighed because this happens a lot.

While in the hospital, I saw the personnel simply pocket the oxy that wasn't used -- say the patient was alseep, or didn't want the dose, or happened to have an allergy. Once issued, that medication doesn't go into a cabinet again -- it goes right into a pocket, and out the door.

The back ally is filled with personnel hanging out with homeless-like types doing..something. Whatever.

The streets are filled with hustlers, and they nod out in the parks. Then they start the cycle again stealing bikes, grabbing cell phones or jewelry.

A group of teens storm into a drug store, demanding the cough syrup required for Purple Drank as they call it. The clerk refuses. They threaten to trash the place. Or they grab the stuff for Drank and try to purchase it through the automatic checkout. The clerk casually lets it go through, chuckling as if "kids will be kids".

I once saw a mother of a boy high in class on dope all the time complain desperately to a principle. Why was he allowing smoking dope in school? The principle merely chuckled and joked about "red eyes". Why? Because it's a great management tool for violent youths -- let them dope themselves into a stupor, they sit quietly. Especially after they've crushed their legal Adderol and smoked it and then need to "come down".

Sorry, I'm not for legalizing drugs. Maybe that's because I see a social and city policy of deliberately making especially black kids stupid -- a shockingly racist policy, in fact. That's the policy of looking the other way as they smoke pot openly outside the school doors, or inside in the stair wells. The principals and and even the police don't fight this blatant abuse. It's a management tool. That the kids are too stupid to study or learn doesn't matter. They are moved along, pushed along, kept high. It's like Orwell's Soma. I have witnessed this countless times with my own eyes. Kids 12 and 13 getting stoned right in the school yard, damaging their growing brains, without any adults stopping them, anywhere, with police 10 feet away.

Doctors -- over and over again I see records where the doctor writes "home medications given" and oxy is listed, although in fact it wasn't issued, wasn't received - and once again pocketed and sold or used. I know two doctors who became addicts themselves -- and had to work painfully to overcome their addiction for years.

This is an epidemic. You don't fight epidemics with "harm reduction" like merely coughing into your sleeve or washing your hands. You combat it with real war. Stopping the root spreaders. Isolating and detoxing the spreaders. The sellers.

All of you human rights activists and other Soros-funded advocates -- you will never convince me. OSI has been mysteriously overthrown on this issue by powerful interests in California and elsewhere in the technolibertarian set who have coopted Soros into funding all this. Not that Soros apparently needed much persuasion, but it's mainly ideologues at the helm who have introduced this obsession with using stealth methods to work to undermine anti-drug legislation and move toward legalization. Hence:

o harm reduction, although it hasn't been shown to work, and no, not in Vancouver as claimed

o pain mitigation which is all well and good, but isn't accompanied by compulsory long-term court-ordered addiction treatment and tightening of procedures to prevent all the abuse I've just outlined above

o hospice/death amelioration which is used as a form of emotional blackmail to force people to legalize drugs in one medical setting, which is appropriate, but again, without the checks and balances of compulsory court-ordered treatment.

I saw what you did there, Soros; I'm unimpressed. Come and look into the face of a drug addicted 17-year-old boy who used to collect Pokemon cards with my kids who is now trying to steal my purse and who ends up in jail. Look into the face of a beaten-beyond-recognition addict who didn't have the promised drug money from sales to dozens of his friends he got hooked due to the flood. Come and sit with parents who lost their kids to drugs -- they come home and find a good student, age 18, lying dead with a needle hanging from his arm.

Many of you promoting this aren't parents at all. If you are, you have only small babies, not teens. you don't get it. You don't see it. You live in wealthy neighbourhoods where the bums and the hustlers and the vets hooked on smack just aren't visible to you. I do. So stop lecturing about human rights. Stop lecturing me about how you don't see the harm to society.

I do, daily. We need to keep the war on drugs. Your child or my child might be the next casualty in the war waged against us, which can only be met with war in return. Peace didn't work. If you don't believe me, send your children to public schools, like I do, and come back and tell me what you think in a year.

Oh, and if you want "humanism," and you think drugs should be legalized, why stop there? Why legalize them, and allow the addicted to stumble around stepping in front of buses or pushing people in front of subway cars?

Put them in warehouses, give them all the drugs they want, like gerbils pressing levers in a cage, give them three healthy meals a day, give them clean bedding, showers and a few other amenities for free -- movies, Internet -- and store them until they die.

That sort of shocking dehumanizing of people is actually what you are advocating, and actually what we will see.

Because of opposition to law-enforcement and the "medicalization" of crime, we will come to such warehouses.

It will be cheaper for the government to put people in such government-run drug hostels -- and hold them there until they either die or agree to go into detox and anti-addiction programs -- than let drugs be sold openly and cartels fight each other (which they will only do more when it is legal).

Just don't cry when you see your loved ones end up in such a warehouse.

11/11/2013

Noam Scheiber has a piece up promoting the idea of Elizabeth Warren for president. I personally am for Hillary in 2016 at this juncture, unless I see a better idea, even though I realize she may tack left. But I wonder if in fact that will be the strategy, as people will be good and sick of Obama's failed stealth socialism by 2016.

Basically, this Warren thing is the Silicon Valley technocommunism perspective -- those that have already made their riches (the owner of The New Republic is Chris Hughes, who made his fortune from Facebok) are happy to prescribe socialism for the rest of us. They figure they not be required to crack loose any of their own stash, or cease their practice of shipping jobs and manufacturing abroad, if they keep funding the campaigns of people like Cory Booker, Bill DeBlasio, and now Elizabeth Warren.

My response:

At least Noam is admitting that young people openly opt for the "s" word.

So
make a Socialist Party, or revive the Democratic Socialists of America,
and go into that, rather than wrecking the Democratic Party.

Ever
since I saw Warren's clip about "you didn't build that," I've watched
her closely to see whether that was a one-off or in fact emblematic of
her socialist "progressive" views. And the answer is: the way you know
she is a stealth socialist even worse than Obama is her harping on the
"middle class". Whenever you hear somebody blathering about "the middle
class," you know their real agenda is socialism. They think that is a
supercool way to cloak their hidden agenda, like any "single issue" fake
politics concealing hard-core cadre organizing for socialist programs.
They think that "ordinary people in the middle class" will then follow
them. Baloney.

I'm not in the middle class; I'm in the lower class
as a single mom of two in the non profit sector. But I'm not fooled by
all his talk of middle class. The way to lift all boats is to encourage
business to thrive, which creates jobs and commerce. Warren is afraid
of commerce; she's a scold and takes a punitive approach to commerce.

She
adopted the Bolshevik Occupy rhetoric of wanting to hang the rich from
the lamp-posts, asking when these regulators stopped beating their
wives. The objective is to regulate, not send to prison. Good Lord. If
there is no crime committed worthy of sending someone to prison like
Madoff, then fines are the appropriate way to go, and certainly Chase is
being shaken down. Punitive practices regarding non-cronies is like
Russia; it has no place in America. Keep it away.

First come
people's hard work, and for some, entrepreneurialism. Then comes the
paying of their taxes. Then comes using that taxes to build roads to
sustain them, as government for and by the people. It's not about
putting first the socialists in the redistribution committee in power
and having them extract and redistribute. Warren doesn't get that. It's
not about her and her power to redistribute; it's about people's work
and their entrepreneurial achievements.

If the Democratic Party
doesn't realize that they cannot have Warren or leftist clones worse
than Obama, and can't produce Hillary in 2016 or some reasonable
moderate candidate who doesn't hate business, then we will be forced to
put in protest votes with the Republican Party. And not for the first
time.

And further, to those who object and keep ranting about "banksters":

Oh, not at all. I challenged Warren specifically on the quote made by
Noam in his article, in which he took great glee, where she confronts
the Wall street regulators. She implies in her quote that the purpose of
regulation is to produce criminal sentences. That implies that
regardless of the truth, regardless of the facts, such boards should
nail people to the wall to satisfy populism regardless of the truth.
That *is* what Bolshevism *is*.

She herself cites no cases; she
doesn't supply any facts; she doesn't say, "I've been researching Jamie
Diman and here's why I think that the hefty fine is not enough, he needs
to go behind bars because of X, Y, Z facts and argumentations I'm
bringing." Instead, she implies in a highly politicized manner that ONLY
if people are put in jail -- like Russia -- without due process,
without facts, can she "win". Win for her Bolshevik cause, of course,
because it's not a win for any just justice system.

Corporate
lawyers with PhDs themselves aren't businessmen and aren't even
practicing lawyers if they go into politics, and begin to spew
ideological statements in a partisan manner. It's great she has a legal
background, but she never seems to have run a business and she has a
great animus to commerce and capitalism.

Fox News is watched
by only 2 million people. The Tea Party is waning. What you're really up
against are liberals and centrists in the Democratic Party itself, as
well as independents, who will not stand for this kind of socialist
demogoguery.

If she really has found corporate fraud, let her
bring the facts, let her have hearings, call witnesses, commission
reports. I don't any of that. She has no case. She is substituting
rhetoric and grand-standing for having a case. That's extremely
dangerous and unjust.

11/06/2013

Obama follows a happier Merkel in 2008 when he was campaigning. Barack Obama campaign.

I know it's almost blasphemous to point this out, so outraged should we be about all this but... we don't know anything of the *content* of what's in Angela Merkel's cell phone calls. It's like...what does the fox say...or something. What indeed?

All we know is that her phone number was on an NSA list for "collection." Like so many, many other Snowden stories, we have the contours without the content. Michael Hayden, the former intelligence chief, says Snowden took the "plumbing" whereas Manning only took random "cups and buckets of water." That is so well said. Snowden is indeed only a plumber. High IQ or no, he's just a plumber of computer pipes, at the end of the day. A lot of rote learning and rote routines encouraging dull, binary thinking. And what he stole isn't the contents of the pipes, but just the blueprints -- to use Glenn Greenwald's word.

So...what in fact did we have from Merkel's phone? Did US Tap Chancellor Merkel's Phone? -- the Der Spiegel headline is an interrogative with good reason. We know this from what amounts to pretty dubious sources with a decided anti-US agenda -- Holger Stark, Jacob Appelbaum and two other people at Der Spiegel (I just don't know why *so many* names are required as bylines on this story: Marcel Rosenbach and Jörg Schindler are two others.)

If I were running the NSA, I wouldn't order the nerds to tap the phones of heads of allied states. Mainly because the fallout would be so great for doing so, but also because I think HUMINT is just way, way more important. I'd much rather have people in place, diplomats and intelligence and counter-intelligence agents who made relationships, talked to people, listened to how they present themselves over time, studied them through the press and other sources, etc. I just think that's more valuable. I think we've gotten out of the habit of both HUMINT and counterintelligence and we need to know more of those and less machine-culling of people. I'd imagine that on her official government phone, she might be so circumspect as to make it pointless to bug. We also don't know if they bugged her old party phone or her current phone as leader of Germany.

The problem with tapping the phone is that you can't use the material justly; but something said even in an off-the-record meeting can be referenced legitimately. And that's better for relationships between states. Of course you need signals intelligence and I'm not the one complaining about the NSA and SIGINT and I'm not at all sure that it needs reform. I don't think reform comes from undemocratic debate coerced by anarchist hackers in any event. But I'm pointing out that to be reliant on in -- just like to be reliant on wikis -- is what has set us up for this massive failure.

THAT we have to run intelligence on Germany is obvious -- they are too close to Russia, which is our decided enemy, and continues to make us an enemy, not the least by by harbouring Snowden. They have enabled terrorists to live and plot on their land -- think of the 9/11 hijackers in Hamburg and others. It's not just the past it's the present, and even Merkel -- she's great on standing up to Russia on certain things even more than Obama, i.e. human rights rhetoric. But she still presides over a vast German-Russian business empire, and that's not in our interest. Germany and Russia are bound, and that means we can never fully trust Germany, sadly.

Or at least...some part of Germany. I'd prefer to think of it that way, as I think there's a war for the soul of the world everywhere, and there are different features and movements and tendencies and you should pick. Germany has always seemed to me to be divided. That is, not the obvious divisions of East Germany (the GDR) and West Germany, but the West Germany that inclued leftists and fellow travllers and outright communist sympathizers and Stasi-supported agents, and then Germans who were liberal or conservative and opposed communism and the Soviet Union. I have been to Germany a number of times and even had the occasion to meet with Willy Brandt and Petra Kelly a number of times, as well as various German human rights advocates, lawyers and scientists. And I distinguished them in my mind between those willing to criticize Russia and work against communism and those not.

Of course Germany is more complex than this, especially in the minds of Germans themselves. So I do take the time to subscribe to several publications from the German embassy and foreign ministry that I read every week to try to understand.

In the 1970s and 1980s, I recall how the Soviets would sometimes leak stories about dissidents -- sometimes disinformation, sometimes a sensation -- through Der Spiegel and other German papers, and also some British and Italian papers, the veneer of foreign authenticity. This was to give their active measures with agents of influence more heft. There were certain Soviet journalists or writers who would regularly perform this function. I believe Julian Semyonov was one -- perhaps those who lived through that era can recall what I mean. They would put out stories that Sakharov was fine in Gorky when in fact he was being force-fed from a protest hunger strike, things like that.

So these old networks die hard. There has always been a Kremlin connection to the radical circles in Germany and there remains one, even if Russia has supposedly dismantled its communism (its authoritarianism remains in place with the same old methods). There's the Chaos Computer Club, where Julian Assange first recruited for WikiLeaks, and where he met Jacob Appelbaum, and whose members were involved in a scandal caught working for the KGB in the 1980s and to this day who are more animated with the fight against the NSA than the FSB.

It seems like the Snowden nest is well-established in Germany with Laura Poitras, Jacob Appelbaum now "in exile" there and others working with CCC and Der Spiegel - so Sarah Harrison has a circle to join. But this isn't new, and goes back for ages and involves many more people, like the professor who wants to overthrow the banks and obtain absolute encryption.

I'm trying to make sense of the German story and I point to these stories for reflection:

o Jamie Kirchick, who has spent a lot of time in Germany, asks Whose Side Are You On, Germany? And that is the question to ask, but the reality is, by asking it, you don't get anyone to change sides. I think we have to identify who the US friends are, especially the forces pressuring Merkel, who was a friend before the phone incident, and reach out to them. It's good to isolate the left which is hugely aggressive on this -- and the far left of not only Pirates and hacker anarchists but violent terrorists of course.

Moreover, by granting Snowden asylum, Germany would be playing right
into the hands of Vladimir Putin. Whatever his initial motivations might
have been in exposing American intelligence practices, Snowden has
essentially become an instrument in the Russian President’s plan to
weaken the transatlantic relationship and divide the West. Ströbele
would never have been able to score his meeting without Putin’s
permission; indeed, there is nothing more that Putin could want than for
Germany to welcome Snowden with open arms, thus allowing the former NSA
contractor to denounce the imperialist Americans from the capital of an
allied nation.

"After analyzing the course of the visit, German
security experts came to the conclusion that the FSB completely
organized and monitored Ströbele’s visit to Moscow and effectively used
it for its purposes," the German daily Die Welt reported.
"The goal of the visit had been to rekindle the debate about the NSA
spying affair, thus burdening relations between Germany and the United
States even more."

This is a somewhat roundabout way of saying that slipping into the
role of the victim has a long tradition in Germany. The special
sensitivity, for example, that the Germans are displaying in the NSA
spying affair on Angela Merkel in particular and the country generally
is often explained as a direct product of the historical experience of
the Germans in two dictatorships. The shadows cast by the memories of
the Gestapo and Stasi, we are told, have made the Germans particularly
neuralgic to the megalomaniac tendencies of the secret services—as
though it wasn’t the Germans themselves who were carrying out the
spying.

This, of course, is a beloved German theme ever since the end of
World War II, which is to say that whenever they can Germans stylize
themselves as victims rather than perpetrators, the objects rather than
subjects of history. Today the rhetoric is correspondingly radical. The
talk is of a “United Stasi of America,” the grasp for digital world
hegemony, even of “cyber-fascism.” Then what would left-wing
anti-fascism be without fascism—antifa, as it is known in Germany
without the “fa”? Suddenly Edward Snowden is not merely a
whistleblower—no, he is a resistance fighter following in the footsteps
of Carl von Ossietzky, the publisher of the “Weltbuhne,” whom the Nazis
imprisoned in a concentration camp.

o Then there's Karl Theodor Zu Guttenberg, former Defense Minister of Germany, who yes, was disgraced by a plagiarism case regarding his PhD but who apologized and has gone on with his life. (BTW, a victim of a concerted plan by the German SPD to discredit him in every way throughout the whole process.) He has a thought-provoking piece posted about admitted carelessness in opsec but also the need for the US to apologize.

Regrettably,
US President Barack Obama and his administration have yet to comprehend
the scale and severity of the damage caused to America’s credibility
among its European allies. The problem is not that countries spy on each
other (they all do). Rather, it is the extent of US intelligence
gathering and America’s attitude toward allies that is most damaging.

So I conclude that we have to mend fences after this rift, and that's being done without bloggers, obviously.

I don't think we can have Germany join the Five Eyes club of the Western intelligence agencies because of the Russian factor. As long as Germany is helping Southstream and a hundred other Kremlin plans and refusing to confront Russia over its awfulness on a 100 things from Magnitsky to the Trans-Dniester region to Belarus, we can't have them a member. But as with NATO, maybe there has to be a Partnership for Peace where certain countries have special relationships or there's a formalized sharing of intelligence.

But this goes on anyway. I keep thinking of the John Le Carre novel, A Most Wanted Man. How authentic is it? I keep thinking of the Muslim charity -- and that last page about the 10% or was it even just 1% of funds that go to terrorism...

Honestly, "reading comprehension"? Bart Gellman tried the same thing on me. Do they all do that? It's so lame and gratuitiously insulting. Do you really think that just because people disagree with your blogs they're stupid? If you really think they missed something, couldn't you just correct them normally? But in fact, Hudson *is* in a gotcha here because he ran this piece without first getting an answer from the witness and he couldn't seem to think of any other narrative -- or admit the existence of any other possibility -- except the one that fits his oppo research against conservatives/right-wingers.

This is all so tiresome.

I will insist on continuing to ask about Benghazi, like other people. I don't care if it is a vehicle for the right-wing. I don't care if Jay Carney says they already had 40 committees and briefings about it. I've never heard answers to the questions that Sean Smith asked about why the "police" guarding them from the February 17th Brigades were taking pictures of their compound hours before the attack.

She asks simple questions that don't have answers. There are bloody fingerprints on the wall shown in pictures. Whose are they? Do they belong to her son? The fact is, maybe they didn't even bother to go capture them and investigate it. That may be the problem. I have to wonder when we are told stories like CNN "just happening" to pick up the ambassador's diary on the attack scene afterwards (!).

You hope they did sweep the scene and take those fingerprints and it's just that it is classified. But really, why classify something already in the news long after the fact?

As Lee Stranahan, formerly of Breitbart, has pointed out -- and again, I do not care in the slightest what political hay Breitbart is making with Benghazi -- the credibility of "Morgan Jones" is not required to make the case of a Benghazi cover-up. And if it turns out he's tainted goods, Eli Lake and Daily Beast, in covering this, have covered themselves -- they've interviewed him and gotten his story and compared and contrasted it, but of course it all still has to play out.

Imagine the spite and malice of the person who not only leaked this witness' report to his employer, contracted by the State Department, to the Washington Post, but also that his name was published! Not only is State to blame for endangering someone, so is the Washpo under Bezos. Awful. They are as bad as WikiLeaks.

I can understand why the GOP is holding up appointments, although I don't think that tactic is effective nor does it make the case. But I can see the frustration. There is a wall of deflection if not derision from the "progressives" on this. They want it to be forgotten and to go away. While Issa may seem obsessive and perhaps he has been wrongfully so, we still don't have these basic answers. Has anyone ever explained why they contracted the February 17 brigade and whether they were infiltrated by or collaborating with Al Qaeda -- the people taking the pictures were obviously casing the joint for an attack!

Imagine, Sean Smith's mother says Obama and Hillary spoke of a protest against videos (!). That's been long debunked, but is there then a recognition that they have to explain what really happened?

I think the placement of blame on Hillary is wrong because I really think she was too high up to be micromanaging this situation. I also don't think GOP de-funding is at issue re: security -- which is the answer the left always gives on this. I don't think Susan Rice is relevant and isn't at fault, she only had briefing papers.

I blame a different thing that is all throughout the building at State, which is the hubris that democracy promotion and civil society projects can proceed in war zones. I think this is just insane, as much as I'm supportive of such programs. There is always this idealization of the situation and our role in these cases and that leads to missing cues from the field. The UN convoy and chief of mission (Ian Martin) a very experienced field mission office, was attacked right before the September 11 attack -- and yet the American ambassador thought he could go out jogging alone and stay overnight in this compound in this area? In order to open up a hospital wing the next morning -- the hospital he then died in? It is so sad. But also so inevitable when we have such "progressive" idealism in the Democrats. I do think Hillary knows better. She has been on hundreds of trips and is nobody's fool about these oppressive regimes and war zones, as her off-mic remarks indicate. I'd much much rather have her president than Cory Booker or whomever Obama's annointed one will be.

09/28/2013

I voted for Obama in 2008 for a variety of reasons, one of which was I actually believed in his health care proposal because I didn't have health insurance and I was going broke with medical expenses for myself and family members.

I didn't vote for Obama in 2012, and voted for Romney instead, for a number of reasons, among which is that I ceased to believe in the health care program.

Let me explain why.

I thought originally that ObamaCare, whatever its socialist ideological problems, would basically do what state public insurance programs like Child Health Care Plus and Family Health Care Plus are able to do in New York State.

Because I work, I was not eligible for the state health insurance, but because I'm a single mother with low income, my children are eligible for Child Health Care Plus, and I can pay a low premium of around $100 a month, plus co-pays and with high deductibles, and more or less prevent at least horrendous costs from their emergencies -- which involve a notorious punishing $1000 ER fee just to walk in the door in New York City. (The people who feel the pain of this whopping fee are not people with insurance -- their companies pay it without complaint; the homeless or indigent don't feel it because they never have any intention of paying their bills anyway. It's law-abiding people who pay bills, with stable addresses so debt collectors can easily harass them, who wind up paying the cost for the uninsured, including themselves, to use ERs as clinics or even just as ERs.)

So I figured that ObamaCare would be something like this, only for adults, and with a higher threshold of means-testing. I never dreamed it would have fines if you didn't join, or that it would have subsidies to state exchanges, rather than clear-cut means-testing.

Of course, I've always wondered why those who want socialized health care don't have states just do this, and have the federal government assist some poorer states and some poorer populations in increasing coverage and creating more free or low-cost prevention programs like a standard package of testing for everybody -- say, one strep throat test, one Pap smear, one mammogram, one prostate test per year for everybody depending on age or sex -- but not taking on the burden of universal coverage. And to be sure, this is being administered through state exchanges, but the premiums do not at all seem to be the mere $100 that Obama Truth Team propagandists claim but more like $200 or even $300 for the same family sizes and income. I just don't see the reality of the $100 premium anywhere, even in the most sympathetic press.

The notion of just how you're going to get subsidized - what the process will involve, what paperwork you might have to submit, etc. was very hazy -- but I knew that's just exactly where all the troubles are for the average person getting state-subsidized insurance.

With good reason, these companies providing this state insurance do not make it easy, create many hurdles, and are arbitrary in the direction of trying to shake you off. That's because it's just too great a cost for any company to bear and not go broke, and so they use every trick in the book to keep people undercompensated or off the program entirely -- especially in anticipation of ObamaCare.

Example: even though I provided my children's passports and Social Security cards and they were proven to be citizens when they joined the program years ago, and had been renewed each year when I re-qualified with new applications without any demand to re-show passports and SS cards already copied and on file, suddenly I was hit at the 11th hour before the deadline to supply proof of my daughter's citizenship after she had been on it for 10 years.

Or even when I already supplied my income tax, already supplied a letter from the employer, I was still hit with yet another form for the employer to sign -- and when the employer submitted it without specifying a salary was monthly -- which was already specified in the cover letter initially supplied AND visible in the totals on the 1099 also sent with the income tax -- it was declared invalid after the deadline passed and then made the whole application invalid.

You would think that if ObamaCare managed fines through the IRS, it would also end this burdensom process of forcing people to show income letters, paycheck stubs, returns, forms, etc. if they simply checked off a box that they had an income tax return and a Social Security Number - then they would be issued the subsidy accordingly. But that's never how it's done.

I also assumed that Obama would be serious about tackling the huge cost of medical expenses with more preventive care, more "standard package" options and delivery of them more efficiently -- for example, in NYC, many high schools have nurse's offices that are essentially branch medical clinics tied to hospitals, with doctors available in them and can administer vaccines. Since the school system requires the vaccines, and the government is paying for health care, why not offer it as a feature of the school system everywhere, and pay the $1000 that it costs to vaccinate a young teen? (Yes, that's the bill I got -- $1000 for a routine set of vaccinations -- and that's likely inflated).

Obviously a big medical cost comes from malpractice insurance -- my OBY/GYNs were nearly driven out of business by these huge costs. They are huge -- and those trying to prove they aren't simply won't think in terms of an individual local practice and what it means to less wealthy urban doctors in particular, and insist on looking at this problem only system wide and trying to minimize it.

The Trial Attorneys of America and other lawyers' lobbying groups and individual law firms are Obama's largest campaign contributors. Naturally they don't want to see this cash cow tackled and Obama won't touch it.

I'm quite aware that as the ObamaCare debate dragged on, there were other hard facts that Obama couldn't address -- big employers moving employees to part-time or contract status to avoid the burden; small companies worried about going out of business if they had to pay for the costs -- and of course the completely ideological and politicized insistence that ObamaCare pay for birth control and abortion-inducing medications, which was unnecessary and needlessly alienated the Catholic Church -- which rightfully questioned why the First Amendment had to be violated in order to put in a health care plan -- given that Planned Parenthood, also funded by the government, exists to provide birth control and abortions for free or low cost for the poor.

But most of all what I have hated about ObamaCare is the inability of Obama himself and his acoltyes and fanboys to compromise.

Government is about compromise. Like many people, I assumed Obama would be forced into the reality of having to compromise once he came to office -- instead, he swung harder to the left, fell more under pressure from the hard left, and has rigidly clung to his socialist orthodoxy. Yes, socialist, and don't pretend it's not, when I went to the same socialist meetings as Obama did in the 1980s in New York City and I know exactly what stealth socialism under "community organizing" is all about.

Obama's unwillingness to get rid of some of the most costly and onerous sides of his plan, his unwillingness to reach a deal over this, is what is most worrisome of all.

What the "progressives" have done with this is enter a realm of ideological shrillness and brittle rigidity the likes of which I've never seen. They claim this rigid sectarianism is the feature only of the Tea Party and figures like Rand Paul and Ted Cruz; they are oblivious to their own rigid ideological insistence that the world contort to fit the socialist view Obama had in his youth and has stealthily tried to impose since he came in office, under cover of supposedly single issues like "health" or "education".

We're used to thinking that the most important disagreements are between the major parties, not within one party; and that disagreements over policies, goals, tactics can be addressed by negotiation or compromise.

Right. So why can't Obama compromise, James? Obama. He's the one who was only elected by half the people; he's the one who does not have even less than half of the country's approval now. Why can't HE compromise?!

I don't care how stupid, insane, clownish or discredited the GOP is and figures like Ted Cruz for whom I have no use and will never vote for.

Why can't Obama change? Why?

Fallows pretends that this fight is only within the Republican Party, between Tea Party types and the more "normal" conservatives. He claims the Obama bots are only bystanders:

This time, the fight that matters is within the Republican party, and that fight is over whether compromise itself is legitimate.** Outsiders to this struggle -- the president and his administration, Democratic legislators as a group, voters or "opinion leaders" outside the generally safe districts that elected the new House majority -- have essentially no leverage over the outcome.

Um, outsiders? But ObamaCare was pushed through and still exists as an imposition despite numerous attempts to defund it and make it less of a monster in the House. Er, leverage? Politics is a process of compromise. It's not about one half of the country bludgeoning the other half into doing something they don't want or need and we all can't afford.

And indeed, in the House, we see more clearly the attitude of most of the country to having to take on the burden of a complex and costly health care program that doesn't just reasonably subsidize at least more of the poor, but tries to lure the healthy and wealthy into giving up more of their wealth to sustain an uncurbed monster with no cost control, and then punishes the poor who refuse to go along with this ruse by making them pay fines. The means-testing and application process have always been kept deliberately vague.

Yet instead of accepting that elected representatives of his fellow Americans who don't believe in socialism as he does as a "progressive," and instead of conceding that when you have half the country only voting for a president, and less than half supporting this particular program you have to compromise, James Fallows comes up with this APPALLING formulation that the problem is journalists who won't do as he say, and become scribes and propagandists for his "progressive" cause and take on reality:

As a matter of journalism, any story that presents the disagreements as a "standoff," a "showdown," a "failure of leadership," a sign of "partisan gridlock," or any of the other usual terms for political disagreement,represents a failure of journalism*** and an inability to see or describe what is going on.

No. It represents free press that is reporting that Obama and the Democrats aren't willing to compromise either. It's not true that no compromise is acceptible as Fallows claims -- compromises have never really been tried. Hard-core socialist ideological militancy is the problem here.

It's scary that legitimate coverage of this as a stand-off -- which it is because Obama will not compromise and thinks he can impose sharp socialism by indeed digging in his heels and waiting out Republicans by causing pain with government shut-down -- would somehow be a "failure". James Fallow is a failure -- a failure of intellectual freedom, indeed a failure of intellectual honestly.

Most Americans feel like they won't miss the government much, even if it does shut down for 10 days or 30 days. Fallows scurries to find emotional examples of ill effects -- like failure to deliver flood assistance in Colorado to try to make the case that it will matter. I think most people think that the shut-down won't happen, and that it's brinkmanship.

So the reality of what should happen when the GOP is forced into such brinkmanship is that Obama should compromise. We have a two-party system -- it's really four parties these days with one in power (the Democratic Socialists of America) with significant Congressional forces like Elizabeth Warren or Ron Wydell adding to the presidential stealth socialism; one (the Democrat Party) unable to curb its minority leftist extremists who are really in a separate, unelected party; and two not in power except in the House, with the fourth, or Tea Party, able to deploy some individual GOP members in its favour. I think we'd all benefit from a multi-party system that would force DSA socialists to get elected and not use stealth methods, and ditto the Tea Party.

But compromise is what has to happen, and that means offers have to come from Obama on what he could de-fund out of his over-costly program. It has to be a significant unilateral move now, and an end to grand-standing on his part. The socialist journalists who keep crying that there is no truth, or that there is a lie only discredit themselves and should themselves run for office as the propagandists of the party they support.

The "social graph" -- the exposure of the network of connections of human beings, combined with other data, and the implications involved -- first was created and followed in online virtual worlds and MMORPGs (massive multi-player online role-play games). The same coders and engineers who perfected these in games and worlds went on to social media where they perfected them further, ultimately for use in elections (Obama was the first candidate to win using the drilling of social network data). Now the notion of the social graph has hit the headlines in relationship to the NSA Snowden scandals (and perhaps a related concept, the social gesture, i.e. every little thing you do online, will be next).

I first encountered the social graph in the hands of Will Wright, designer of The Sims Online, an outgrowth of the hugely popular Sims game moved to real-time interaction by real humans online. The humans obviously weren't automated like the Sims offline game, but they were automatized by having only a limited repertoire of automatic actions they could perform, and a rote set of chores and tasks they had to complete in order to stay functioning -- the diamonds above their heads had to be "kept green" and "out of the red" by having the Sim play pool, socialize, sleep, go to the bathroom, eat, dance, work, etc. Interestingly, even within the confines of this open-ended but regimented game, people devised all kinds of creative ways to do two things people like to do most: a) make money b) have sex.

Will Wright had various collectivized collaborationist "better world" notions he forced on the population, i.e. creating "group jobs" that would force people to socialize and collaborate to complete tasks. These were quickly sabotaged. Either people just built bots and made alts to run through the chores at top speed and generate "simoleons" as the world's cash was known (which had a real black market value on e-bay and gaming exchanges), or they would devise extra rules, like making bets on the outcome of pizza options, or they would optimize the aspects of the game in superior ways to try to beat their adverse disruptions -- i.e. placing toilets next to wood-working benches for the Sim to toilet while he worked as it really didn't matter if he ran across the screen to a sheltered toilet -- he was an imaginary character and there was no need for him to experience shame if that was actually reducing his income generation by taking up precious time and steps and reducing his maximum output.

If anything, it was funny to see how most people -- even with robot routines imposed on them - kept to their offline culture -- they insisted on toilets removed from workplaces and eating areas and insisted on doors and walls; they didn't want gambling and cheating because that "ruined the fun," and they chose esthetic beauty of their homes and stores rather than maximized job production or Sim recovery. It is very hard to eradicate human culture and spirit.

One of the aspects Will Wright built into the game which caused universal havoc was "Friendship Balloons". This was my first experience of the social graph -- unfortunately, I don't seem to have any screenshots left and I can't find any online today although surely someone has one, given their huge importance to this virtual world.

Everyone had a "balloon graph" or social graph that showed visually who they were friends with, how good and close their friendship was, and who their enemies were. So each time I met someone, I could choose an option to hand them a balloon, and we would be linked by "friendship". Our balloons would start out bright green in colour, but if we didn't keep visiting each others' homes, and didn't keep interacting, say, by dancing the jitterbug or at least chatting and shaking each others' hands once in awhile, the green would fade, the once-bright balloon would fall to the bottom of the graph, and then even disappear beneath pages and pages of such balloon stories.

By the same token, if someone came and slapped me or "gloved me" as the game mechanics showed, i.e. throwing down a gauntlet, then our relationship would be recorded as red. Someone would have to come back again and "piledrive" or otherwise use negative attacks on me to keep the red in -- otherwise, it, too, would fade.

The balloons picked up not only people you actually friended with the balloon gesture, it picked up other metadata -- other people who simply happened to be at the same job location or club location as you. So if you walked into a bar, all the other people would "show up in your balloons" and show up faintly as green -- if you didn't interact with them in any way, they would fade and drop down in the pages and ultimately disappear.

The game designer himself -- Will Wright on his alts -- was the first one to pollute it by buying friendship -- he paid 100 simoleons to people to friend him, so he could gather more balloons and move up the friendship list -- there were leaderboards as in all games. We could also tell that he had friended -- or accepted 100 from -- Mia Wallace, the most notorious mafia queen who ran the Sim Shadow Government which ultimately took over and ruined the Sims Online for many people with its corruption and terror -- I've always thought Will Wright deliberately allowed evil to enter his world "to see what would happen" and to see how the human spirit would attempt to overcome it (which it did, but just not sufficiently, in part because of constraints in TSO's own rules, chief of which was suppression of press freedom -- because the game company felt it couldn't check rumours and police libel, you were not allowed to report the bad behaviour of any other individual or group on the forums, and that meant no one could ever warn other players or rally against the Shadow Government.)

Besides buying friendship, what happened is that virtual wives soon discovered their virtual husbands were cheating on them -- they would see a suspiciously green balloon at the top of their boyfriend's pages -- was he dancing the jitterbug just a little too often with that certain Sim?

Another negative side effect was that people came deliberately to slap you to "red up your balloons" -- and it would spoil your reputation because people thought perhaps you got into bar fights or didn't cooperate sufficiently on group job objects and were "trouble". Some people automatically ejected from their establishments anyone who entered with a lot of red balloons in their pack.

People would endlessly study these balloon graphs --and I mean endlessly -- you could tell at a glance who was a friend or foe of whom by red or green status. They would see who were the most green; they would be jealous over literal greenness if a special friend didn't "keep them in their balloons". They would deliberately go over and try to socialize to keep certain popular people "at the top of their balloons". They would avoid others and push them down the pages out of sight.

Of course, all of this had the extra added headache or pleasure, depending on how you looked at it, of "mapping" and the option to "map" or "not map" a friend and give out those permissions. So you could open up the world's master map, and spot where your friends were, and teleport to them to keep green -- or they could block you, so you couldn't find them and keep up that green -- and would have to guess where they might be -- perhaps by checking their balloons and see who was in their inner, greenest circle -- and then guess where that person might be and teleport there. People naturally developed all kinds of mapping strategems -- knowing that people had to keep up their jitterbug and piledriving skills, they would go to the skill lots where these skills had to be kept up by interacting with various objects, and then head there.

As all MMORPG players know, there are always a set of concerted players who want to nerf or dumb down or disable the negative features of games -- so it wasn't long before people began to lobby to get rid of the "red balloons" idea as it harmed their reputations and some were deliberately going around gloving others to make them look bad.

By the time we migrated to Second Life or There or other open-ended social worlds, the balloons had been replaced by friendship cards, but these were not made visible. So it wasn't long before some bright young coder thought it would be great to design what he called the SL Wristwatch which would track all the people near you within 96 meters, track how often you were in each other's proximity, and then post this online so that people essentially could make the same kind of TSO balloons in rough fashion.

But very soon people began to howl. The online edition of these early social graphs that existed before Twitter was born, before Facebook was widely used and popular -- in 2004-2005 -- showed up people that other people didn't want their friends to know about. The same problem developed -- a sim wife would find that her sim husband was shown 96m near his old girlfriend or near some other woman and that became suspicious.

Or enemies or griefers who wanted to discredit others would keep showing up in their 96m range to make it look like they were friends, constantly showing their proximity.

This proximity data would be used to find out where the most people were and where they went hte most; who was the most popular; who was related to them, and of course led to friendship and influence seeking behaviour. But it was fairly rapidly shut down -- just like years later GirlsNearMe was shut down for the same privacy-exposing behaviour.

Then the next scandal involved another "improvement" on this proximity data -- now the IP addresses of every one coming to the sim were collected, and this led not only to showing who was with who, but it also outed alts -- people with the exact same IP address (and yes, many are in fact dynamic, or fluctuate within a close enough range) but who had different alt accounts would be outed.Also their habits would be on display -- if they went to a gay club or shopped at a BDSM mall.

So there was an enormous outcry over this privacy-stripping function -- even in a virtual world where most people were anonymous -- or thought they were. And this function was banned.

Activists in worlds and games who tried to stop greedy coders from scraping enormous amounts of data and displaying it in order to change behaviours -- all as ultimately a marketing test -- were strong enough to stop some of the geek game-god practices but didn't have enough social cohesion and sophistication and power to be able to stop them more broadly as they moved from games to social networks.

No one complained when Barack Obama drilled the social graphs everywhere to construct polling data and organize massive Get Out the Vote phone calls based on issues or demographics -- Obama for America grabbed all that right off the top, mixed it and drilled it and won, then morphed into Organizing for Action, and took all that data with them, and few complained that a Democratic Party candidate had now taken with him for his private use in a nonprofit the people's data gathered in a national election.

Those to the hard left or hard right of even "progressive" Obama only complained when the NSA, an institution with far more checks and balances and compliance with the rule of law than game or virtual world companies or social media compaines or OFA did this lawfully in pursuit of criminals.

No one complained when the chief of police in Steubenville gathered social media and cell phone data, texts and photographs, and used it to prosecute two young men who had raped a girl at a party. If anything, Anonymous, which used brutal vigilante tactics to out many others in the social graph with these men and this girl, falsely accusing innocent people and permanently ruining the lives even of those who were rightly disciplined or prosecuted with this case, was applauded by feminists for "getting" those football team members with "rape culture". The kind of "rape culture" that coders routinely disdainfully indulge in when a company or government is hacked, and they blame the victim for wearing too short a skirt, i.e. failing to salt or hash data base tables.

Today, when anthropologist Katy Pearce routinely collects openly-available Twitter accounts and elaborately tracks who has tweeted to whom about what in Nodex and other programs, nobody complains except me. She can claim to out government informants or pro-government supporters with these methods by seeing what they say and to whom, although I've cautioned, being even more a supporter of independent (as distinct from GONGO-ized) civil society than she is in Azerbaijan, that people sitting on the fence, or ordinary people still shaping their opinion, or people who just might not like the opposition for various reasons, can be mistaken in these methods for "pro-government" and in fact alienated and not won over by the movement. There are also many alts and bots polluting the information but you can't always tell the difference.

09/17/2013

Once again, the fear, the lock-downs, the shelters-in-place, the sirens, the helicopters -- even with people dangling in a cage over roof-tops. Then Google and Facebook and Twitter searches to find pictures and past and explanations, then candlelight vigils and grim lists and crying relatives and grave presidential pronouncements.

It is all so familiar and predictable now that it is almost like reciting a set of prayers or going to a religious ritual.

Of course, we've learned our lesson from the net-nannies of social media -- we must never, ever ask questions, especially in the first 24 hours. We must never make assumptions or find the wrong people on social media.

So we can never ask if it is a terrorist attack, and instead, we have to rush to explain it away as workplace violence or merely somebody with a grudge.

The shooter turns out to be black -- but nothing to see there, move along, but do note that all those theories that "white crime" means mass school shootings and blacks never commit these types of mass shootings go out the window.

Once again we're instructed that it's all prejudices -- if the shooter is white, we say mentally ill, if black, we say angry, if Muslim, we say terrorist, if Asian, we say cryptic. Ismail Ax!

Once again, the shooter himself is shot dead and so we can't really find out. Once again, there's a second shooter -- and then there isn't.

There's been so many of these, and so well-spaced and seeming to come after other weakenings of the country and society or times of turmoil (like presidential elections or Snowden) that you wonder if there is a foreign enemy that has acquired a secret weapon that can ferrett out via Internet searches persons who are "off" or "ready to explode," and then send microwaves of mind-suggestions to them to turn them into robotic mass killers to create these devastating incidents.

So it's likely just that strange amalgam that comes up each time -- first, the access to guns -- say, that's the most important! Second, mental illness that no one seems to ever be able to do anything about, or perhaps a form of autism that we're supposed to know is never violent. Then it spills out later -- violent TV and violent video games (which we're supposed to pretend have absolutely no effect on anybody because, why, everyone would be a killer then), or drugs (which we're supposed to be for legalizing).

Seattle police released details late Monday of another shooting incident from 2004 in which Alexis shot the rear tires of a vehicle owned by a construction worker doing work in his neighborhood. Alexis told police he had an anger-fueled "blackout" but added that he felt he had been "mocked" by the workers and "disrespected" by the workers.

Alexis also told police he was present during "the tragic events of September 11, 2001" and described "how those events had disturbed him." Detectives later spoke with Alexis' father in New York, who told police Alexis had anger-management problems associated with PTSD, and that he had been an active participant in rescue attempts on 9/11.

He also double-talked his way out of an incident where he shot at the ceiling through a neighbour's ceiling -- a neighbour about whom he'd complained before -- but then said it was an accident cleaning his gun. So each time, he was excused, and went on being mentally ill or angry or bearing a mysterious grudge and of course keeping his gun access and possession. And there we have it. You can look for Iranian secret zap weapons over wireless, but you can also just look at our typical homegrown circumstances that always seem to come together the same way again and again.

Even so, there might be terrorism, or some radical act of sabotage with some kind of political agenda here, and it has to be investigated. Maybe there isn't, when we're told within 24 hours about the workplace anger narrative and told over and over and over by pundits and thought influencers and experts to shut up, and not make assumptions.

So here comes J.M. Berger, the expert on terrorism, to explain it all to us. First, he implicitly tells people not to make judgements early on, especially on Twitter or from tweets, by approvingly noting those who counsel caution. Then he proceeds to indulge in just this himself.

He says CNN says it is merely that the shooter wasn't paid. Then he makes a macabre MT comment about the other incident today, when somebody lobbed a firecracker over the White House wall. Funny two things like that happening the same day.

Yes, J.M. quips "Hope it was worth it" about this person's "cause" involved in throwing that firecracker, which obviously led to his arrest.

As if any cause would be worth it, or worthy of any type of praise, even ironical, if it involved throwing a firecracker at the White House. On a day when 12 people were shot dead in the Navy Yard.

There are worse things.

There's J.M. Berger's Omar and Me. Yes, it's as bad as you might think -- or worse. I almost couldn't look. Before I looked, I had very vivid in my mind the briefings that UN security officers give to humanitarian groups about terrorist groups, where they show you their video messages where they tell you in very clear terms, with sprightly music and song sometimes, that they want to kill you, a humanitarian worker -- because they tell you in no uncertain terms that their job is to kill white, Western, Christian, Jewish infidels -- in as large numbers as possible.

I made the statement some weeks ago that J.M. Berger minimizes terrorism. That has been my consistent experience with him over and over again, watching his comments on Central Asia, the Tsarnaev Brothers and the Boston bombing and so on. Oh, I totally get that he is a world-renowned expert on terrorism with publications and a think-tank position and lots of Twitter followers and a person of stature. That's all a given. I get all that. I just won't go along with it, however. I think he consistently minimizes terror. He dismissed the Navy Yard shooting instantly, before we really had enough information by retweeting CNN's workplace violence narrative. Please don't tell me RT doesn't equal endorsement -- of course it does.

And then..."Omar and Me" is hugely troubling. Basically what happens here is that Berger befriends a terrorist -- a spokesman and propagandist for Al Shabab, one of the deadliest terrorist groups in the world, which has ruined Somalia and killed our colleagues in the humanitarian field and of course numerous civilians.

It's like a bigger and more sinister version of those rushing to turn Barrett Brown into a journalist although he is mainly a hacker saboteur and destroyer of other people's servers he doesn't like. J.M. Berger decides that merely propagandizing for a terrorist group isn't the same thing as being a terrorist and that befriending him is a legitimate intellectual and scholarly and even civic activity. I disagree, and so do the US courts, since they put a translator of Al Qaeda who put up pages praising them in jail for abetting terrorism, despite all the civil libertarians who complained.

It's not just the role confusion, however, it's the way J.M. Berger purports to speak for all of us, as some sort of enlightened intellectual advance-guard, some elite in the capital that can decide just how much terror is needed to pass or not pass as a liberation struggle:

Our conversations turned more ideological, pushing and pulling over terrorism and the intentional targeting of civilians, the significance of the Arab Spring, and Omar's belief that the United States was oppressing Muslims around the world. We sparred over whether America had a national security interest in the establishment of an Islamic caliphate, one of his pet obsessions. He argued that the United States feared the caliphate; I argued that we wouldn't much care as long as terrorism wasn't the method for its establishment. Just when the conversation would start to get interesting, he would pull back.

No, J.M. No. We do care. Few of us want a caliphate that would take away all our rights. It's hard to think of how a caliphate would be installed in a blanket way without the use of force so it's naive to think it won't be. If for some reason this was achieved through stealth and deception and elections but not actual terrorist attacks, many would still fight against it intensely -- the idea that we "wouldn't care much" and have all pre-capitulated to a theocratic society is just scary -- and you can see how the right-wing bloggers go crazy with this kind of red meat.

Maybe J.M. Berger means well -- he's all understanding and empathetic to this terrorist speaking on behalf of despicable human beings committing atrocities (all of which remain off-stage vaguely in the distance through Berger's lengthy description of his lovely conversations). But I actually think he doesn't mean well at all. I actually think this kind of intellectual depravity and slide into moral degradation is what happens when people want power for their class or tribe. I think like others in this particular punditocracy, he wants to slay real or imagined neo-con or conservative or even just liberal thinkers, journalists or politicians he sees as opponents for media influence or grants or the ear of Congress. I think this group works to stay in power by portraying others more critical or troubled by terrorism as causing the very thing they loathe or in any event being ineffective at fighting it - and it wasn't so bad to start with.

There's the supreme vanity of the scholarly expert at play here, too -- that demanding the right (despite the social and moral taboos) to get close even to a loathsome subject so as to be able to understand it and explain it -- and then, of course, become the go-to guy about X or Y brand of terrorist movement. I'm sure there will be a wave of adulation and envy over J.M. "Omar and Me" because he got this story -- and lucky for him and all his admirers, Omar's dead now, so we don't have to see how the real end of the story might turn out, with Omar participating in some horrid atrocity even as he is DMing thinky pearls of wisdom to J.M. on Twitter.

I don't think there was a terrible lot to learn from Omar -- just like Orwell might say there isn't a lot to learn from befriending yet another communist or fascist up close and personal. Isn't it all pretty clear? Is "dialogue" about unhappy childhoods and economic beefs going to woo these terrorists out from terror to deals that American think-tank elitists arrange for them to come to safety and serve ever more as an interesting exhibition? No, it seems not.

J.M. didn't even seem to want to learn what Omar had to tell him -- that he found that Boston thing pretty odd. How could there be terrorism with no message? he asked. Good question! That should be a red flag to ask more questions about whether in fact it was an "authentic" terrorist act, or something else that had to do with Putin or Kadyrov either scripting the propaganda of the deed (there's the line Putin left out of his infamous op-ed piece) or letting nature take its course out of spite.

Instead, he hurried to explain to Omar that these terrorists were homegrown.

One of the things J.M. wants to do is be "balanced" and "respectful" -- and he hastens to tell his jihadist subjects that he covers other types of American extremism, too (that's why he needs the Tsarnaevs to be homegrown bombers without serious overseas ties, and why he needs to cover other kinds of right-wing terrorism on American soil, the better to be persuasive in getting the Al Qaeda story). He also wants to make sure no one will ever criticize him for Islamophobia. Hence, this conversation -- which shows in the end, in fact, that it's pointless to play these politically-correct games, extremists determined to commit violence are not persuaded:

I sent him samples of interviews
I had done with jihadists and conservative Muslim clerics in the past to show
him that I treated my subjects respectfully. In response to a question, I told
him I don't write solely about Muslims; I was interested in all types of American
extremism. Abu M agreed to consider my request, probing my intentions in the
meantime. He said my respectful tone in the interviews was not consistent with
the mocking comments I had posted about his autobiography.

I get it that J.M. has a right to this approach and that it is in demand and has more credentials than anything I might say. Even so, I'm going to insist also on the right to express revulsion at this -- and beg for a "team B" to study these same set of facts with a different lens.

As always the case -- I remember the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson, and the current one, Navi Pillay using this term -- Obama deemed the shooting "cowardly".

It's as if liberal adults can rise up and try to shame the shooter by pointing out that far from being a big man who has scared everyone, he is a cowardly mouse who had to use terrorism to address his grievances and not behave like a real man.

I find that whacky. Terrorists -- and mass shooters, ideological or political or even just deranged -- have powerful will and determination and don't suffer from any lack of courage or failure of nerve. They are not cowardly but in fact incredibly bold. That's how they're able to kill people and we're not able to stop them.

I think to understand the nature of horror and moral terror like this, you do have to go back to the version of Joseph Konrad's Heart of Darkness portrayed by Marlon Brandon in Apocalypse Now. Like a diamond bullet, we should realize that somebody has men like this -- somebody does have ten divisions of men like this. It's just a question of finding out who, mindful that it may be among ourselves, and maybe some in our society do have such a life-or-death cause.

09/12/2013

I hate my banks. I've never found a good one, and I've tried multiple ones. They have those horrid $35 overdraft fees that you get whacked with no matter how hard you try because they cunningly change the dates that certain debits hit automatically -- like some $3.00 charge suddenly hits out of nowhere that you had thought debited long ago when calculating your accounts -- and whoops, 6 other checks mess up and you get whacked. Really nasty.

Or take this -- I deposit a check, some of it clears as it always does, I happily go away on vacation, and then suddenly discover that a hold has been put on my check and the amount that wsa initially made available is now locked. The hold is put on for *11 business days*. Huh? I call and call and discover that it's because the issuer of the check has forgotten to put the date on the check. The person calls their bank, straightens it out, and I call back my bank to tell them.

But then...They buck me again and I go in circles. Ultimately, I come back from vacation and go in to the branch in person -- but going in person to a bank does no good nowadays, they merely call their 1-800 number for you -- it's eerie. They have no power to do anything in that branch about that check physically deposited in their ATM. I go back to the issuer -- and they confirm that their bank has already debited the amount *on the first day*. Naturally, after doing that, the issuer's bank felt their job was and wasn't interested in pursuing it.

But meanwhile, my bank held that check for *10 days needlessly* just on that excuse of the lack of a date -- which the bank of the issuer didn't care about and let go through. It did that because it was a convenient excuse to make interest off the float -- that's the principle of banks and I get it. No amount of effort to try to get these two banks to talk to each other and release my funds would work.

I had the same sort of endless loop and paralysis from the branch when I put cash in the machine -- and it didn't record and show on my balance. I was really hopping mad on that one and asked them to get back to me when they counted the drawer that day. They said that some other unrelated service did that and they couldn't do anything. Again, for 14 business days, I struggled to have them reflect that actual cash that had actually gone into their ATM reflect on the balance -- finally it did.

Or take the time that one of those evil debt collectors with sewer-service (i.e. no proper service at all), who I'd actually been sending regular payments to, suddenly slaps a lien on my account, but I don't know that because no notification is given by that sewer-server or by the bank. I go in and deposit a large check. Although the lien amount is small, and easily covered by the large check, the *entire amount* is held *for 30 days* causing major life havoc. Can you imagine such idiocy? Why? Because the lien technically put the account into negative, before the large check cleared -- which normally it would do in 2-3 days. So that became an excuse to freeze the entire thing. The bank demanded that I get a statement from the debt collector that they were satisfied now and had been paid. They refused until I got a notarized statement from the bank -- which I immediately did -- that there were plenty of funds available to cover their lien the following day.

Despite the eventual clearance of the check and plenty of funds available to clear the lien, both sides kept circling endlessly each requiring the other to produce proof of this already-happened event in order to unfreeze the account, pay the lien, and give me access to the rest of my money. It was insanity, and I kept calling all kinds of offices; my favourite was when I called some department or something or another that happened to be in Louisiana, and I heard the people just laughing out loud with each other when I called them. I finally just closed the account to try to force the issue. Whereupon I was billed for all the $35 charges for various automatic payments that hit the bank account *with a perfectly cleared check with its funds availbale on it* but then got rejected. It was Kafka. No, it was a bank.

So yeah, I get it about banks -- insanity. I always marvelled that those Occupy Wall Street freaks never took up the *consumer* issues of banking that are like this -- the $35 charges, the wild occurrences with holding of funds that are really available, etc. We all have these stories. Why didn't they picket banks over the $35 charge? Had they done that, I *might* have come to a demonstration, although likely not, as I don't share their radical solutions of overthrowing capitalism to solve these things. I'm for reform, not revolution.

In fact, litigation has helped to mitigate the $35 issues. There are several successful class-action suits that have forced some of these banks to reform their evil practices -- like those ones where they suddenly rearrange all the dates of when charges hit to make more checks bounce to their advantage. And nowadays, banks don't have those charges if you specify that you opt out of them when they involve certain kinds of transactions -- although it doesn't free you from the scourge forever.

Of course, I remember when the "funds not arranged" fee was $5 or $10, not $35, and when checks didn't take so long to clear or didn't get held. Oh, and I remember when we had 10% interest on our savings accounts, too. Oh, well.

But despite all these negative experiences with banks, which have actually driven me to use check-cashing agencies and post office money orders instead -- despite their fees -- simply because they are more fast and reliable and ultimately cheaper in the end -- I don't have any hatred for "banksters".

First of all, it would be awfully hard to hate the poor tellers and managers in the branches, many of them minorities in entry-level positions with low-paid jobs because it's not their fault at all.

Yeah, I get it that the real people with the money are way above them and live in palaces and all the rest, empires made out of our $35 charges. But you know, we could also just manage our accounts better -- and one way to do that is to buy a money order, because when it's debited, it's really debited as cash, and you have a way to trace it, and it doesn't come back and "hit" much later to surprise you. Yes, it costs a $1, but why not keep the post office going? I'm happy to do this. It works for me.

I'm sorry, but every time one of these Occupiers rants on about how the banksters haven't gone to jail even as the hackers have, I shrug and say, "Good!". The hackers have been guilty and belong in jail. I'm not seeing what the evidence is for cases to be tried as *criminal offenses* rather than civil.

For one, this article, while it admits some have gone to jail, doesn't really give us the full monte: lots of bankers have gone to jail in fact. Here's ten right here.

They're just not happy that the CEO of companies haven't gone to jail. Well, I'd like them to report out evidence that isn't ideological, that isn't hatred of capitalism, that isn't just venom and spite, but is an actual list for a real indictment. I'm not seeing it. And so they are just posturing and propagandizing.

My answer:

What separates us from Russia or China is
that we don't jail people for practicing capitalism because we have a
free society with a free market. In Russia, there isn't due process or
justice for people like Mikhail Khodorkovsky who would never be in jail
in America.

And that's just it. You sound like the wildest
Occupy Wall Street nutter wanting people to go to jail to satisfy some
sense of "justice" you have. But you and others making this demand
never, ever explain what the actual criminal charges, and criminal
EVIDENCE would be to charge these people with *crimes*. It's especially
puzzling when they've had civil charges and faced stiff penalties, yet
it's never enough for you, you won't be happy until they are behind
bars.

Yet you don't report any evidence that would justify
turning these cases into *criminal* cases, and you just wave your jazz
hands and say oh, they must be too big to try.

09/09/2013

Tomorrow brings the New York City Democratic Party primaries, and it's time to look at the candidates for borough president and mayor.

I've been busy covering Moscow's very interesting mayoral elections as for the first time in the Putin era in some 15 years, an authentic opposition candidate came close to forcing a second round -- anti-corruption blogger Alexei Navalny got 27% of the vote by contrast with Putin protogee Sergei Sobyanin's 51% -- although it looks like a second round will be dodged by the powers-that-be.

The New York elections should be interesting after the long over-stay of Mayor Bloomberg, and a number of women running for the slot of both borough president and mayor, but somehow, they have more of a farcical feeling than often crazy Russian elections because of the presence of Anthony Weiner, if nothing else.

We've been lobbied heavily here at Waterside Plaza because it's a bloc of 4,000 people in a captive audience or sorts. All of the candidates for borough president were invited to speak due to intense campaigning here on a local issue involving city plans for tearing down a perfectly good medical school and dormitory for med students next to a half dozen hospitals, and replacing it with a garbage truck depo that will increase noise and rats and hazards as they convert a one-way street to a two-way street. The mind boggles at how decisions like this get made...

In one sense, seeing all the candidates and hearing all their spiels you think they're all perfectly fine people, and it's too bad they can't simply work as a team on some of the city's many problems, whether in the abominable schools or with controveries like stop 'n frisk.

In the weeks since, we've been literally papered with palm cards and hand bills from these candidates on the street or in our mailboxes, and of course received numerous door-to-door knocks from campaigners and the robo-calls. I've even gotten live calls from people "thanking me for my support for Julie Menin" ( but I don't support her) merely because she spoke at Waterside, and evidently she wrote a letter about the garage -- although as one of the candidates admitted, it wasn't really a decision they could directly effect.

It was especially wrong because the people in the neighbourhood were fed up with noise and garbage rats and drugs and craziness -- and even when they negotiated in good faith with the radicals running the urban camp and made an agreement that they would stop their crazy obsessive drumming by 11:00 pm every day, the radicals immediately broke the agreement because they had hard-core anarchists in their midst who simply didn't believe they should make things comfortable even for low-income or middle-income back-office workers of Wall Street who lived nearby -- the homes of the real rich who were the target of the Occupiers were nowhere near that neighbourhood and even have offices up town.

Precisely because they couldn't moderate themselves and suppress the radicals that undo every society in the end -- and couldn't govern -- the police finally broke up their camp. Good! The right to petition and assemble and have free speech doesn't include overnight urban camping violating the rights of others. Restrictions as to time, place, and manner are legitimate and recognized as constraints even on the very liberal First Amendment. There's no reason why they couldn't have the stalls by day and go home and night to let people sleep and the city sweepers clean up. But no.

Whatever Julie did for health care for firemen and others who suffered from the contaminated air after 9/11 -- and she was hardly the only one advocating this -- it's undone by her deliberate and unnecessary flirtation with radicals like this and her embracing of this radical line. You just don't make common cause with people trying to overthrow the mainstay business of this town, I'm sorry.

And it gets worse -- her fliers are filled with heavy hate-the-rich campaign messages in which she votes *against* these developments:

o Turning St. Vincent's Hospital into Luxury Condos - as if the hospital wasn't already doomed

o The Chelsea Market - calling it a "giveaway"

o NYU's Expansion -- calling it a "land grab"

I liked St. Vincent's as much as the next person and had quite a few emergency visits and a long family health care saga there as it happens, but the reality is, this Catholic hospital could not pay its bills and the city could not justify keeping it open with its own subsidies. The city had to consolidate with other hospitals. Hospitals are EXPENSIVE to run, especially when the poor use them as clinics (that's why the solution of the Patients' First type of commercial but low-cost neighbourhood clinics are a good replacement).

Walking into an ER in Manhattan will cost you $1000 before you even open your mouth to have your temperature taken. That's the punishing fee tacked on to anyone who can show an address to be billed, with or without health insurance, to cover for the homeless or vagrant. People with health insurance never feel this; people like me who have gone without insurance are paying it off for years and years.

So sorry, but luxury condos is what it is. That's the business that can afford to pay for the land and run business even in this poor housing climate; that's what goes in that space and what pays *taxes* which is then used to cover the health care of the poor (including my family members). That's how life works.

It's not like St. Vincent's wasn't slated for remodeling anyway, and bitching about luxury condos is just hate-the-rich bullshit.

As for Chelsea -- anything they get as a giveaway is fine by me -- they are out of the way and don't get as much foot traffic as other venues and they are a roof over the heads of numerous small businesses, particularly with fresh food for the localvores and local crafts. I'm not getting a thing wrong with this -- it's just anti-business spleen. Unless it's a giveaway program run by city cadres, it can't be allowed to thrive in this town?

As for NYU, again, sorry, but I can't be nostalgic about blocks of shabby 5-floor coldwater walkups on the bad sides of Little Ukraine that house drug addicts currently and instead, could house student dorms for corn-fed Iowans who want to be medical students and pay first NYU then all the local businesses a lot of money. Again, do you want a tax base? Do you want business to flourish and prevent further flight of business? Do you want people to LIVE here and thrive? Or do you just want an ideological core of Upper West Side yuppies to live in a virtual world while the world collapses around them? (Of which WBAI's demise is emblematic).

I know from 35 years of reading the Village Voice that I am supposed to hate on New York University. I don't. Two of my childrens' friends' parents have jobs there; another friend does as well. My childrens' friends go to college there. It has a right to live. It does live, and pay taxes. There are other scenic places in the city to go to and sit in the cafes, and actually, it's not as if there aren't plenty of little restaurants and shops remaining all over the East Village anyway. That dead area around the Puck building and the K-Mart could all be torn down and filled with dorms and nobody would really care. It's not like quaint little cobblestone streets are being torn up and greengrocers being thrown out on their ears.

Then there's Jessica Lapin, who is also favoured by some of my neighbours who are part of the local Dems "machine" -- a judge, some lawyers, some tenant leaders who rallied around her.

I will not give her my vote precisely because she deliberately went in our faces with the pro-abortion line which is so UNNECESSARY in a city and state where abortion is legal, safe, accessible, and free or affordable. There's an abortion clinic literally a few blocks away, and there is absolutely no trouble accessing it -- there are no picketers or crazies blocking it.

I've never seen one of these, in a 50 block radius or anywhere in fact. They must exist, but I've never heard or seen one, and I go to a Catholic Church, where you'd think

And that's just it. This is a Catholic area. There are many Catholics who live near the several big Catholic Churches and Catholic schools in this area. There are lots of Irish, Italian and Hispanic immigrants, old and new. And they tend to oppose abortion, and there is absolutely no need to get in their face in a city and state where -- as I keep telling you -- it's legal and accessible and you do not need to fight for it.

Women's "reproductive rights" aren't under attack here, but the right to freedom of expression of the other side.

It's such a non-issue, because these clinics that Lappin finds "misleading" are a tiny handful of entities that in fact are easily seen as what they are --- and haven't misled any actual people that these politicking posturers can point to. Everybody gets it.

This is not Missouri or Texas. This is New York City. And there are only 12 of these crisis centers and they are hardly able to shout over the din of the pro-abortion lobby, which has been for some mysterious reason -- because it's part of bonding for the left and gives interns something to do -- out in full force with flyers haranguing every passerby telling us to help them close down Komen (a despicable act on their part), support Planned Parenthood (our tax dollars already go to it whether we like it or not) and stop these "lies" from crisis centers. My word, it's as phony as a three-dollar bill.

Regardless of where you come down on the abortion issues, you'd have to concede that this just isn't the number one issue for New York City. Instead, far, far more serious issues are:

o appalling state of the schools

o stop 'n frisk

o terrorism threat versus intrusion on Muslim community

o bicycle paths and Citibike

and so on.

That's where another candidate, Robert Jackson looked better -- all of his speeches and flyers have focused on education -- he even walked literally to Albany to campaign for more funding. He explained in pragmatic terms how the garage issue was really most to be affected by local council member Dan Gorodnick in our neighbourhood, and the rest would go by what he did. He also explained the various stages and paperwork filing requirements in this process which was helpful.

NONE of these candidates mentioned stop and frisk from the podium

But now I'll tell you who I *am* voting for -- Gale Brewer -- and why.

o Although no doubt she's as lefty as they come representing the Upper West Side, she does not have a single bit of hate-the-rich rhetoric in her speeches nor does she flog the politically-bonding leftist memes.

o She focuses on very, very practical and mainly doable issues like getting rid of bed bugs in schools and hotels (!) and getting paid sick-leave for city workers -- and achieves goals with them.

o She doesn't get in your face with the anti-abortion rhetoric although certainly she supports abortion rights -- it's just that it's not necessary

o Although a non-tech middle-aged woman, she was the only candidate to have a tech plan and to be consolidating communications on her website, creating portals for services, etc.

o All of her cards have been on point and without negative ads against the others.

So she has done things for working women (paid sick leave is often for mothers having to stay home with sick kids ) and for women's rights, but there doesn't have to be this endless abortion jam (even though I have no doubt she is for abortion, it's just that it's not necessary to flog it).

I spoke to her briefly after the meeting and mentioned the hospital issue. It is a problem because they are crowded and there are day-long waits in the clinics, sometimes two-day waits, it is very debilitating. I certainly wouldn't want any more of them closed - and she has worked to prevent another hospital uptown from being merged.

But the reality is, something else has to be created other than large, impersonal, overstressed city hospitals with ERs filled with gunshot victims mixed with babies with ear-aches. And in my view, that has to be the paid patients' walk-in solution (and that's what they should turn the med school dorm into, if for some burning reason they really have to move it uptown). Why paid, even $50, even $100 (which is all you pay in ours -- instead of $1,000!). Because doctors have to live. Immigrants who come here to med school and are willing to work in poor people's practices still have to earn a living.

Meanwhile, I had already decided I'd support Christine Quinn due to two big factors:

o a Jesuit father at reception telling me they were for Quinn, and couldn't understand why people were beating up on her

o
the hard-core gay radicals dumping on Quinn, even though she is lesbian
and has done a lot for gay rights just because she's a sort of Hillary
to their wish for an Obama -- it's that awful ugly "progressive" gang
that uses dirty tricks, negativity and hatred to put in the harder left
agenda --- and I just won't support it. In this case, it's the transgenders claiming she hasn't done enough for health care for them. I find this sectarian and excessive. Transgenders need safety above all -- with police protection from bullies and thugs - and have health care special needs as well which should be met. But so do we all. And the special pleading in the anti-Quinn articles on this issue as a reason to sink her was whack.

And...Sure enough, right on cue, we have a "racism" scandal right on the eve of the elections -- completely contrived.

It
seems Bill de Blasio is married to a black woman and has a son whom he
featured in a campaign ad about building a better New York for
everyone. I didn't see the ad but it sounds perfectly fine to me -- all
candidates are always featuring their families and kids and making it
seem like they spend every moment thinking about the children. It's all
the norm.

Bloomberg made a crack about this in a lengthy interview
in New York magazine to the effect that he thought it was "racist" that de Blasio showed
this ad. What he meant to say was "divisive" or "race-baiting" -- but
naturally everyone was quick to point out that showing his own family wasn't racist, duh. The scandal broke before New York walked back this cat and edited the piece to reflect what Bloomberg meant to say better -- which still wasn't good enough, of course.

But...the entire incident had that feel of manipulation by the left that always and everywhere plays gotcha and screams "racist" when the real issue is about socialism. The socialists and "progressives" hate Bloomberg as a rich guy and a businessman who they feel caters to Wall Street. He explains very practically in his interview that you need the rich to pay taxes to sustain the poor, and it has to be in a balance, otherwise they flee.

I've been critical of stop 'n frisk because my own son and his friends -- even though they are white -- have been stopped, and worse, handed nuisance desk appearance tickets which are the real bane of the system because even if you are innocent, you must show up or be thought guilty.

I asked Robert Jackson about stop 'n frisk and tried to get him to see that it was a problem for ALL of us -- of all races. He just wanted to campaign on the black aspect of it, understandably, because he himself is black and representing the woes of areas disproportionately affected by this. It has been argued over endlessly because the "disproportion" first happens in the crime statistics, and the police argue back from that.

While blacks feel they are disproportionately stopped, in fact Hispanic, white, Asian, everyone are stopped in many areas and ANYONE who is stopped who is innocent is going to feel resentful. If you tackled three things about this:

o getting rid of the DATs where totally unnecessary

o not stopping inside residential complexes and leaving it to internal security to handle and call police only as needed

o making bail more accessible and workable

you would get rid of a lot of people who don't need to be in jail over this intrusive program.

What I liked about Jackson -- again on this issue as with education and the garage depot -- he was helpful and informative and pragmatic -- he explained that the program was aimed specifically at taking guns away -- somehow you never hear that - and that's what it's focus should be.

I would be close to voting for Robert Jackson -- my son said he would -- if it weren't for the fact that in the end, I opted for a woman instead. That's how politics is.

Now that a judge has declared stop 'n frisk unlawful, maybe some progress will
be made. But what I appreciated about Quinn is that she didn't tackle it
head on to be removed, but wished to reform it and had a good working
relationship with Kelly, the Police Commissioner. I'd rather have that
kind of seasoned and reasonable politician in power than an ideologue as
di Blasio seems to be, touting an idea to tax everyone who makes more
than $500,000 and force them to pay for pre-school.

I'm sorry, but
I'd rather do it another way -- encourage business, have more jobs,
have women make wages, and then pay for day care of their choice,
including providing a job to another woman to work in their home as a
nanny rather than place their kid in large day care centers were they
get neglected and get sick. Maybe there is a role for some subsidized day care but why shake down the people helping the recovery from 9/11 and recession?

It's gotten so that the Democratic Party doesn't represent any sort of normal business any more -- not even small business, not even corporations with consciences. They are hell-bent on ideologically blazing solutions to kill off development and collectivize the shrinking tax base for socialist solutions.

There is no normal party that appreciates normal capitalism -- which of course requires legal restraints, the rule of law, and social justice programs to ensure everyone is treated fairly and the poor and vulnerable are cared for in society. The extremes of the "progressives" and Ron Paul libertarians have become so marked and prominent that you feel there is no normal politics anymore.

I don't think this is normal politics for the city or the country, and I wish more people would show up to vote.